Wednesday, 20 May 2015

I have always tried to be honest in my videos and blog posts, letting you guys see and hear things about my life that I never thought I would feel comfortable posting online. However, in the last year, I haven't felt like I wanted to let you guys in.
I guess you on one hand could put it down to priorities; moving to a new place, meeting new people. My life changed, for the better, and the outlet that my blog and channel provided no longer had the same appeal. I pushed getting my degree and making new friends to the forefront of my list of priorities, and making videos and writing posts seemed to slip further and further down the agenda. However - on the other hand, it was a case of anxiety (now before you tar me with that 'blogger-anxiety brush, please listen me out). I was starting to grow as a YouTuber, being recognised in the street, people wanting pictures etc. and to be honest - that scared the living daylights out of me. Coming to university, I just wanted to blend in, make friends and come out of uni with a decent degree and a group of pals I would have for life. As my channel was growing, I started to see not only good comments, like the ones I saw when I was starting out - but I was also starting to see some really freaking negative ones, and I HATED it. It made me forget about the good things and hone in on only the bad.
A year later, I'm stronger as a person, I have closer friends than I could have ever imagined having and I feel I'm ready to start again. I will begin by giving my blog a little makeover and then once that is complete, start getting back on track with videos and finally get back into the swing of this whole bl/vlogger lark.
I've missed it so much, but I'm ready to come back, bigger and better than ever. Watch this space!

Oops... Now I for one am feeling sorry for my thirsty hair so wanted to find a good hair mask to fix my (stupidly self inflicted) issue. In the past, I have used bumble and bumble hair masks - however, the price tag is just too steep, so I thought I would head to Boots (although they do now have B&B in Boots now.. But nevertheless) to begin my search for a high street priced quencher for my damaged locks.

Now, though I am stressing that my hair is damaged, it really isnt as bad as to be expected! However, this is because I have used a number of dyes that aren't too damaging and are always semi-permanent (brands such as Directions, Crazy Colours and Fudge) so all in all my hair isn't as bad as it could be!!

My first encounter with BLEACH London Reincarnation Mask came when I used the BLEACH White toner 6 months ago and found I really liked it and wanted to give the bigger bottle a try - however, on my several trips to my local Boots store I was met with nothing but an empty shelf and bitter disappointment :'(. However! I went into a super-Boots, by that I mean this shop was MASSIVE and there it was, 200ml of hair mask-y goodness waiting for me for just £6 a bottle.

The packaging was really gorgeous. I love the designs of all of the labels of the BLEACH products, the colours and edginess to the designs are just wonderful.

The tube itself is silver and made of metal - a bit like an old tube of paint! (Which I love). However, one thing to make sure of is that the lid is always on. Any dents in the metal packaging will try to push the product out and you may end up wasting product!!

Thursday, 27 March 2014

So I know my blog design may not be anything innovative or particularly visually striking, however - that's precisely how I wanted it. When looking through multiple blog designs on the blogger database, I was dissapoimted by the extreme lack of simple but visually pleasing themes that they had to offer.

I therefore thought long and hard about solutions and remembered my days of using the popular website Piczo. Now for those that don't remember Piczo (it has unfortunately been shut down now) it was a site that was popular with teen girls for making blog pages. These pages look a little like the picture below.

They also often contained multiple glittering gifs such as :

and...

Cringeworthy now, I know; but at the time, it was quite the done thing. now, though it's super simple now just to save an image and stick it into your blog. Back in the good ol' days it wasn't quite this simple. The average 13 year old girl in the year 2007 probably had more knowledge of how HTML works than most computer users today (or maybe not, but it felt that way!!). In order to insert gifs from other websites, you would have to use a HTML code, then- if it was the wrong size, you would have to find the part of the code that corresponded to the dimensions of the image and change them, and so on and so forth. Basically - it was just a nightmare. It was only when you got really good at these little things that your blog became worth looking at...

Therefore. I learned the tricks of the trade: downloading fonts, colour codes etc and absolutely pimped out my blog like it was nobody's business. However. When year 8 came around and we all discovered myspace - Piczo was sadly a thing of the past and all of my newly acquired skills became utterly surplus to requirement.

Then, when I began blogging again; however this time on a more sophisticated interface, I found new uses for my skills and was once again feeling very smug and skillful. уαу ƒσя נєѕѕ нєнє <3

Therefore, in a series of blog posts, I'll be sharing my tips and tricks as to how to achieve the blog you've always wanted!

Monday, 2 December 2013

Today's post is going to be a little out of the ordinary, but I really felt the need to write this, and as I'm lucky enough to have this platform in order to do it - I thought I may as well take advantage of that. Now, for those that know me, they may think that me writing about self esteem is a little hypocritical, basically because although on my YouTube and in everyday life I'm confident in the way I present myself, however under that exterior, I have some fairly deep rooted insecurities. People that know me well will know that I have parts of me that I'm really not okay with, although for the last couple of hours I've been really giving this some thought and have found the courage to come out and confront these (dare I say) misconceptions I have with myself and perhaps get some more of you to do the same.
First of all, I should explain how I came to this moment of clarity, and how my thought process has been since then. Being fairly restless and downright bored this evening, I decided to hit up Reddit. For those that aren't aware of Reddit, it is basically a website that has forum pages on just about anything and everything imaginable. Some of my favourite /r/'s (an /r/ is a subpage) are the Paranormal, NoSleep and Books. However, this evening I was feeling adventurous and decided to click the Random button at the top of the page. This magical button takes you to a random sub-reddit, some quite disturbing, some very boring. One of my many clicks on this button led me to the /r/Rateme page. For those that are interested, you can look it up, but I'm not linking it here on my blog, it really upset me to be honest. Now, on this page, people post pictures of themselves, sometimes with a bit of backstory, for example:

This post has 26 comments, examples of these include:

Now, it's not like I don't understand the concept of constructive criticism, I really do get it. But what I don't understand is why a beautiful 21 year old girl is seeking validation and improvement advice from the Reddit community (a site that has a primary readership of (sorry to say it but...) often misogynistic men aged between 20-30, need proof of that? Just check out the number of comments on the /r/gonewild pages.(NSFW)). Whilst looking through more pages, I started to see comments about the size of girls noses, the colour of the hair, the size of their boobs. The criticisms just went on and on. Now, before anyone starts telling me "Oh, but they put themselves out there, the commenters are just telling them their honest opinion!!" - I get that too, however, what caught my attention was when I clicked onto some of the harsher commenter's profiles, what I found was post after post of negativity. Nasty internet trolls that have nothing better to do than to insult fragile 20-somethings about their appearance. This really really really grinds my gears.
The reason behind my moderate frustration was not wholly at the nasty trolls themselves, but the attitudes that many people have started to adopt nowadays through tumblr, reddit and instagram. Many people have taken on the idea that rating sites and improvement pages are a way of gaining and maintaining confidence, when really - as I have recently discovered, is certainly not the right way to go about it.
Being confident and having self esteem are very different things. Being confident is more of an external representation of yourself - what you'd like the world to see. Whereas self esteem is your internal acceptance of yourself. Whilst sometimes sites such as the Reddit /r/rateme page may give you that little boost, until you face your own little insecurities and realise (as fooking cheesy as it seems) that we are all beautiful in our own ways, self esteem will never really be achieved.
Now, I personally have two really big insecurities, my teeth and my arms. I've had braces for donkey's years and was constantly bullied growing up because of them. I remember being in Year 5 and being accidentally added to a group chat on MSN where some boys were talking about me and I clearly recall a 10 year old boy saying "ye m8, could prob fit my dik in tht gap in her teeth LOL" and it breaking my heart. Partly as I wasn't sure why he'd want to do that, but secondly because it was the first time I'd realised just how gappy my teeth were. Nowadays, that insecurity isn't so much of a big deal as I've had braces and they're coming off in two weeks time (yay!), but really, the nervousness about opening my mouth, or smiling with my teeth on show has never really gone away. However, upon realising this is becoming a real issue and I have actually changed my behaviour in order to gain validation from the idiots that made me insecure about it in the first place, I'm going to make a conscious effort to ignore the voice in my head telling me "Shut yo' damn mouth gurlfrann, aint nobody wanna see dat" and simply get on with life and grin as I please. My second insecurity is another one I picked up because of bullying and that is my arms. I've always had really bad eczema and I have always tried my best to hide it in order to avoid funny looks and crass comments, however more recently, I've been trying to a) get it cleared up (which is a lot easier now it's not hidden away and forgotten about) and b) forget it's their and just wear whatever I fancy wearing and not let it dictate what I can and can't do. It's taken me a really long time to work out why I hated these parts of me, but once I thought about it, then subsequently confronted these niggling thoughts - I'm now able to just accept that they're part of me and there aint much I can do about it!
I just wish there were more people that could wake up, a bit like I have, and stop seeking validation from a load of strangers and just see that they're gorgeous in their own way. I'm hoping that even just one reader of this post can look in the mirror, work out something they're insecure about a confront it, cause I know that when I did, I felt a massive weight off my shoulders and well and truly gained a bit of self esteem.

Sunday, 13 October 2013

So on Saturday (12th October) myself and some other Youtube/Blog girlies headed over to Shoreditch's Hoxton Bar and Grill for the Boohoo.com Christmas advert shoot!

I was so very lucky to receive this gorgeous Gold Foil dress and some really fabulous shoes that I'd unfortunately sent back to their shoebox by the time these outfit pictures were taken! However I will leave a link to them here. Due to being 5"9 already, the extra height those babies gave me made me feel just a tad uncomfortable! (However, they are beautiful - I spied lots of shoe envy from passers by throughout the day).

The shoes I opted to wear for the rest of the day were some black canvas platforms by Office - which are just so comfy!

PS: thank you Leanne for snapping these pics!

Also may I just point out, yes - I do have a lilac quiff! Still deciding whether that's something that will be sticking about, but at the moment - it's looking like a permanent feature!

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

Some of you may know I went to IMATS London on Sunday the 23rd of June and I had a fabulous time :) See vlog here! I picked up some wicked bits and bobs and to see a full haul, check out my YouTube channel - Jambers8!

One thing in particular that I picked up was from the (EXTREMELY DISCOUNTED) NARS counter! I got this badboy for £12.50 (RRP: £32!??!) I was over the moon! It was such a steal and I really just couldn't believe it!

It is a multiple duo - basically, two cream products that serve multiple purposes! I use the real techniques stippling brush to apply the product and will probably use it solely as a blush!

As usual for NARS products, the packaging was b-e-a-utiful!

Can we all just take in how gorgeous that looks un-swatched! Was tempted to keep it like that forever!

Orgasm, the most popular NARS blush was something I was excited to try! I was super tempted to try the powder form of the blush, although there isn't much point of purchasing it now! The longevity of this as a blush was just out of this world! Typing this at 11:20pm after at least an 11 hour wear and its still going strong!

In the pan this was something I doubted I'd wear but felt that for £12.50 it was worth getting the duo even if I was only going to use one side! However, when I got home and tried it on - a whole different opinion was formed! I LOVE IT! The shimmer is subtle and the consistency is divine, perfect for a shimmery bronzed look!